The Wiener Holocaust Library in London is the oldest institution in the world dedicated to the documentation of the Holocaust and Nazi-era persecution. It was founded in 1933 in Amsterdam by Dr Alfred Wiener, a German-Jewish veteran of the First World War who had begun collecting material on antisemitism and Nazi activity in Berlin during the Weimar period. The collection moved to London in 1939, was partially used by the British government as an intelligence resource during the Second World War, became publicly available as a research library after the war, and remains a working research institution today. It is located at 29 Russell Square in Bloomsbury and holds over one million items.
The founding by Alfred Wiener
Alfred Wiener was born in 1885 in Potsdam, served as an officer in the German army on the Western Front in the First World War, and after the war became Syndicus (legal advisor) of the Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens, the principal organisation of liberal German Jewry. From the early 1920s he had been collecting documentation on the rising antisemitic movements in Germany, in part to support the Centralverein’s legal cases against antisemitic publishers and propagandists. The collection had grown by the late 1920s into a substantial documentary archive on the Nazi Party, the antisemitic press and the wider racist movements.
Wiener fled Germany in March 1933, immediately after the Nazi seizure of power, taking the collection with him. He established the Jewish Central Information Office in Amsterdam in May 1933, with funding from the Anglo-Jewish Association and the Joint Distribution Committee, to continue the documentation work. The Office collected and analysed Nazi publications, government decrees, antisemitic propaganda and information from refugees, and produced regular reports for distribution to Jewish organisations and to interested governments through the 1930s. The Office was, by the late 1930s, the principal English-language source of analytical material on the Nazi regime’s antisemitic policies.
The wartime move to London and the British use of the collection
With the German invasion of the Netherlands appearing imminent in 1939, Wiener moved the Office and its collection to London in late August 1939. The collection was housed initially at 19 Manchester Square. The British Foreign Office, the Ministry of Information and various intelligence services made substantial use of the collection during the war as a reference resource on the German political and racial situation; the collection was effectively a lending library for the British government on questions of Nazi policy and personnel for the duration of the war. Wiener’s reports to the British and American governments through the war included some of the earliest English-language analyses of the persecution of the Jews in occupied Europe.
After the war Wiener moved the collection again to its present site in Bloomsbury in 1956 and renamed the institution the Wiener Library. He died in 1964. The institution continued under successive directors and has expanded its collection through donations from survivors, refugees and institutional donors throughout the post-war decades. It was renamed the Wiener Holocaust Library in 2018 to reflect its principal subject more clearly.
The collection
The collection includes over a million items: books, periodicals, pamphlets, manuscripts, photographs, posters, eyewitness accounts and ephemera. The most distinctive holdings include the substantial collection of pre-1939 Nazi publications that Wiener acquired before the war (much of which was destroyed in Germany itself and survives only in this collection), the Eyewitness Accounts collection of around 1,300 testimonies gathered by the Library staff in the late 1950s in a systematic effort to record the experiences of survivors before they died, the collection of Nuremberg trial documents that the Library acquired in the late 1940s, and a substantial archive of family papers and personal documents donated by survivors and their descendants.
The Library’s reading room is open to researchers without charge; the Library does not function as a museum and does not have the visitor numbers that the Imperial War Museum or Beth Shalom attract, but it is the principal British research library on the subject and is heavily used by academic and student researchers, by educators, by journalists, and by family historians researching their own histories.
The Library’s wider work
The Library has, since the 1990s, expanded its programme to include public exhibitions, school programmes, public lectures, the publication of the academic journal The Wiener Library Bulletin (published 1946 to 1981 and revived in different forms since), and digitisation projects that have made substantial parts of the collection available online. The Library’s associated charity, the Wiener Holocaust Library Trust, has been the institution’s principal funder since the 1970s. The Library is recognised as a Designated Collection by Arts Council England, the highest level of national recognition for a non-national museum or library collection in the United Kingdom.
See also
- The Netherlands
- Beth Shalom Holocaust Centre
- Imperial War Museum Holocaust Galleries
- The British Dimension
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Sources
- Ben Barkow, Alfred Wiener and the Making of the Holocaust Library, Vallentine Mitchell, 1997 (the standard biography of the founder and history of the institution)
- Daniel A. Gross, “The Library That Witnessed the Holocaust”, The New Yorker, 26 November 2018
- Christine Schmidt, The Wiener Holocaust Library: A Hidden Treasure, Wiener Holocaust Library, 2019
- Andy Pearce, Holocaust Consciousness in Contemporary Britain, Routledge, 2014
- Tony Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination, Blackwell, 1994
- Wiener Holocaust Library, https://wienerholocaustlibrary.org
- Wiener Holocaust Library catalogue, https://www.wienerlibrarycollections.co.uk